JEREMY SCOTT ON MAGNUM

The designer fills us in on Moschino’s new ice cream hook up.

Jeremy Scott is no stranger to the bold and the brave. A true Pop Art provocateur, his collections for both Moschino and his eponymous label are invariably charged with a fearless maximalism, playfully riffing on everything from fast food logos to the objects and imagery of high camp Americana; his latest collaboration with ice cream kings Magnum and arch muse Cara Delevingne, then, should come as no surprise.

Celebrating Magnum’s Double range (which, as its name suggests, doubles the chocolate factor of everyone’s favourite ice lolly), the campaign initially launched last month with a tongue-in-cheek short film that embodies the collaboration’s ‘Release the Beast’ message. Featuring a strutting Delevingne and a cast of cartoon critters drawn by Space Jam maestro Uli Meyer – you can watch it here – the short is every inch a Jeremy Scott vision.

Predictably, the designer was as ebullient about the project as you would expect when we spoke to him during the big reveal at last month’s Cannes Film Festival. “I started creating all of these different characters and these different personalities,” he explains, “thinking about what accessories I could put on them and making each one unique.”

From those novel beginnings, it was only right for a man obsessed with cultural iconography to get 21st century legend Cara Delevingne on board. A huge admirer of the model, Scott gushes, “everything with her is so effortless…The secret ingredient to Cara is that she’s genuine…That’s why she’s been someone that has captured the public imagination without the vehicle of a reality show or these other things that have done that for other people. She really bursts because of her silly expressions, her uniqueness, and her own qualities.”

That kind of star quality is certainly something Scott knows more than most about. After all, he counts Katy Perry, Miley Cyrus and even The Material Girl herself as friends and die-hard fans of his work. In fact, as far as he’s concerned, Madonna and Delevingne are cut from the same gilded cloth. “I think there’s something very similar there. Both of them are strong individuals. Both of them are different, but they both say, ‘This is who I am.’” High praise indeed.

Even so, while his world might be the rarefied stratospheres of Pop royalty, the designer’s heartfelt political convictions have been shining through in his recent Moschino collections, and he’s keen to use them as “a platform to speak about what is not okay.” Don’t expect him to lose his trademark sense of humour anytime soon though, because fundamentally he believes in the power of hope: “If my shows, if my work, if this commercial, can take people out of what’s going on for a minute, then that’s an important element that we need in this world, maybe more now than ever.” We second that. Anyone for a Magnum?